I'll try and keep this short and sweet. As you may or may not know, I am the kind of person who has taken to recycling my rotten food waste in my own backyard, that is, I compost. This practice has been around for longer than anyone can remember, hell, nature has been doing it from day one. That being said, it stands to reason that compost is a fairly benign thing except for the occasional vermin or insect problem due to poorly balanced piles.
I'm bad at segways so bare with me here. The other day I was traipsing through the local Lowe's and it struck me at the ridiculous quantity of fertilizer(s) that they were stockpiling there for the coming spring. We're talking thousands of pounds of manufactured chemical fertilizer, in just one store! It was, once I actually pondered it, amazing! This is another one of those "AHA!" moments. Think about this for a moment folks. One store carrying various brands and formulas of artificial plant food that in large (or even kinda big) quantities is toxic to both plants and people, piled high on pallets to be sold off at a considerable price. Every year tons of this stuff are shipped all over the country for lawns and gardens both residential and commercial. Now keep in mind everyone, this stuff by itself is relatively safe (relatively, so is C-4), however, in the wrong hands, mixed with the right components, this stuff can blow the side off a commercial building.
Now in contrast let's look at compost. This country produces millions of tons of food waste each year that could potentially be composted and recycled into nutrient rich fertilizer. A child could eat a handful of finished compost and likely experience no ill effects at all. You could fertilize your entire garden heavily with this stuff and not harm the water supply or the local ecosystem, hell, the worms will love you for it, and the food you harvest from it will actually make you Healthier! This stuff could easily be produced 1)at home in your own backyard, 2)with the use of worms in your basement, garage or even your kitchen (try that with the chemical stuff) 3) produced locally in each city or state to benefit the local economies and job markets. Compost doesn't, or at least shouldn't, require any special federally inspected manufacturing plants, bureaucratic regulators or chemical engineering degree. Furthermore, this stuff will not explode even if you light it with a match.
So this is my question; Why do we pay ridiculous prices for a newly produced, artificial, toxic, and potentially explosive plant food when we could be creating domestic employment while reducing our wastefulness and increasing the nutrition of our foods and the health of our families and communities?
I think that if we think about even slightly, we will find the answer. We are greasing the wrong wheels.
We Bid You All Farewell
8 years ago
4 comments:
in America we are taught that quicker is better. so lots of chemicals make it faster. no on cared that the run off would give johnny 6 nipples and 3 eyes. now all the sudden we are seeing the cause of the greed and some people dont want to give up their green lawns. selfishness wins sometimes...
im going to play devil's advocate and say ignorance. its the lack of knowing how to correctly compost your own food waste that drives people to the premade solution of buying a bag of chemical ridden stuff bc it says in big fancy text on the package "will double the size of your tomato plants". sure the information is out there if you bother to read the books, do the research online, but a lot of people are too lazy to make the effort to educate themselves.
"...recycling my rotten food waste in my own backyard"
You said it right there. Compost is "open source" fertilizer. It contributes nothing to the tertiary economy. Making your own fertilizer for your own plants out of your own garbage in your own back yard is an incredibly efficient use of resources--so efficient, in fact, that nobody's going to make a dime off you doing it. Nobody has to sell you a compost bin or a compost starter or any such thing. No chemical companies profit, no government regulators get funded. There are absolutely no middle-men unless you want there to be.
Local laws are written to discourage do-it-yourselfers. If you want to build your own home, grow your own food, collect your own water, defend your home, generate your own energy, make your own medicine, or manage your own sanitation, you're going to have Nanny Government looking over your shoulder disapprovingly every step of the way. We're supposed to hire "professionals" for that stuff.
"...this stuff will not explode even if you light it with a match."
Neither will C-4. ;) Nor will ANFO (fertilizer + diesel), for that matter, though I've heard of Ammonium Nitrate becoming unstable when it degrades from being heated over 200 degrees. Incidentally, if you know what you're doing, you can make Potassium Nitrate, one of the key ingredients in black powder, from a compost pile.
"You could fertilize your entire garden heavily with this stuff and not harm the water supply or the local ecosystem."
*wince* Compost, especially well made compost is nowhere near as dangerous to aquatic ecosystems as chemical fertilizers are, no question. But nitrogen is nitrogen, and too much of it in the water will promote algae blooms, duckweed, or other plant life that, when growing out of balance like that, can lead to fish kill. If you have plenty of carbon in your compost to lock up the nitrogen, and you're tilling it into clayey soil nowhere near surface water, it would probably be impossible to overdo it in a small home garden, as far as water pollution is concerned. But if you're just using rotted cow manure and your garden is near a creek or pond...I'd treat that just like a commercial-grade chemical fertilizer.
"I think that if we think about even slightly, we will find the answer. We are greasing the wrong wheels."
No doubt. I think our civilization does an awful lot of that these days.
"Why do we pay ridiculous prices for a newly produced, artificial, toxic, and potentially explosive plant food when we could be creating domestic employment while reducing our wastefulness and increasing the nutrition of our foods and the health of our families and communities?" "we" don't. the new conventional is happening.
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